This Autonomous Quadrotor Swarm Doesn’t Need GPS

The outdoor testing that the video shows is notable for a few reasons. Some of it is done in very low light, which is always impressive to see for any VIO system, since it depends on identifying enough features to make a good position estimate, a tricky thing at night. And you can’t tell from the video, but the average wind speed during the outdoor tests was 10mph, with 18mph gusts. It’s a very robust tracking, in other words, which makes it more likely to be useful rather than just a novel demo. This research was done at the University of Pennsylvania in Vijay Kumar’s lab, by Aaron Weinstein, Adam Cho, and Giuseppe Loianno. We spoke with Giuseppe for more detailsMore>>